TUTORIAL:

BioLegato
Overview

Oct. 21, 2014

BioLegato is
best thought of as a program that runs other programs. BioLegato is the
primary graphic interface for launching programs in BIRCH. For
each
program, BioLegato provides a menu that lets you set program
parameters,
launch the program, and view the output. BioLegato takes care of
all of
the
background details, such as translating files from one format into
another. In many cases, output also goes to a new BioLegato
window,
making it
possible to do ad
hoc
pipelining. This is one of the most powerful aspects of BioLegato,
because it
means that you can usually run additional programs using the
output of
one program as the input of the next. In contrast, most
browser-based
applications display output in a human-readable form that allows
no
further analysis by other programs.

Historical note:
BioLegato
was inspired by the GDE program of Steven Smith, which later
evolved
into the GCG SeqLab interface. GDE was a multiple sequence
alignment
editor that ran external programs. We have tried to generalize
that
basic concept to create a general purpose GUI, that ultimately,
will be
able to work with many different types of data, even beyond the
domain
of biolgy.